Posts Tagged ‘fonts’

Every now and then we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to.

In this selection, we’re pleased to present Pompadour Numeral Set, Lato, Crimson Text, Espinosa Nova, Musa Ornata, Spatha Sans, ColorLines, Roke1984, Neuton, Avro, Baurete and other fonts. Please note that some are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts; they may change from time to time.

New High-Quality Free Fonts

Pompadour Numeral Set (.eps, released under Creative Commons) A beautiful numeral font released by Andy Mangold under a Creative Commons license. The font can be useful in various settings, for instance for packaging design or logo deign. The .EPS file is available for free download. The font is free to use as long as the credit is given.

Lato (open-source sans serif) Lato is a san-serif typeface family. The semi-rounded details of the letters give Lato a warm feel, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness. Lato consists of five weights (plus corresponding italics), including a beautiful hairline style. The first release includes only the Western character set. Designed by Lukasz Dziedzic.

Crimson Text “Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful old-style typefaces. There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties such as old-style figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like. In fact, a lot of time is spent developing free knock-offs of ugly ‘standards’ like Times and Helvetica. Crimson Text is inspired by the fantastic work of people like Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. We hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse.”

Espinosa Nova: Regular (registration is required) Espinosa Nova is a revival of the types used by Antonio de Espinosa, the most important Mexican printer of the 16th century and quite probably the first punch cutter anywhere on the American continent (1551). All of the fonts intended for setting text include small caps, five sets of figures (old-style and lining, both proportional and tabular, plus tabular small caps), many “f” and long “s” ligatures and a capital sharp “S” (U+1E9E). Designed by Cristóbal Henestrosa.

Color Lines This decorative font can be used for a variety of products, such as posters, packaging and label design. Original and unique. Designed by Anton Gridz, and available in AI format.

Baurete (free download) A playful, intriguing typeface that could work for designs without rigid alignment or symmetrically positioned elements. Baurete is free to use for personal and commercial projects. If you want to use it, please contact the designers at [we {at} welab {dot} info]. You can download it for free.

Neuton Font Neuton is a clean Times-Roman–like typeface by Brian Zick. In structure, it is a transitional type with Dutch inspiration. The x-height is high and the color dark, and it is economical in ascenders, descenders and width. Also available in the Google Font Directory.

Melbourne (personal use only) Melbourne is a sans-serif with a strong modern presence. The designer’s intention was to create a calm space-saving typeface. The glyphs have rounded corners and relatively large tracking, which makes it a good fit for dictionaries, indexes, catalogues and so on. When used at a large size, Melbourne can be used as a display or headline font. The typeface is released as a draft, and suggestions for improvements are appreciated. Designed by Marco Müller.

ROKE1984 A free display font based on geometric forms and mathematical symbols, this one includes accents and numerals. An interesting option for technical designs that call for a distinctive yet slightly challenging appearance. Designed by Wete. Available in OpenType format.

Classic Round: medium and italic (registration required) This typeface was designed for text and display use. In small text sizes, the typeface looks clean, inviting and legible. When used in big display sizes, it looks playful and interesting. Designed by Ben Blom.

Free Font FR Hopper: regular and italic (registration required) FR Hopper is a sans based on geometric forms but still retaining a friendly personality. It is intended for mid-length texts, captions, titles and almost any other occasional use: posters, flyers and even websites. The typeface comes with 7 weights, 12 styles with 836 glyphs, and many advanced OT features such as small caps, discretionary ligatures, alternate characters, fractions, arrows and ornaments.

Darth Vador Free Font An original geometric font for the Darth Vador theme, designed by Juart Little from France.

League Script #1 “League Script #1 is a modern coquettish script font that sits somewhere between your high-school girlfriend’s love notes and handwritten letters from the ’20s. It includes ligatures and will serve as the framework for future script designs.” Designed by Haley Fiege and available in OpenType format.

Four Free Type Free original and playful OpenType fonts available in two font weights, regular and italic. Supported languages are English and Russian only. Designed by Alexey Frolov.

Musa Ornata This typeface, with its cheerful characters, could be a good fit for event announcements, grocery stores and public transport signage. To activate the alternative case, check the “Character Palette” in the OpenType options toolbar in your application. The download link is available at the bottom of the release post (above link). Designed by Carvente Dice.

Skyhook Mono: regular This family is a carefully handcrafted monospaced typeface family that is modern, sturdy and minimalist, yet distinctive enough for refined and classy uses. The regular weight is available as a free download. The free weight may not be used in political or religious works.

Phoenica Std (personal use only, registration is required) Phoenica offers an alternative to contemporary humanist sans serifs. It is a flexible family suitable for editorials and corporate branding. Phoenica comes in a big variety of weights, each available in both roman and italic. The regular width is available as a free download and for personal projects.

Indento: bold (registration required) “Indento is a multi-purpose modern geometric slab serif for headlines, posters and branding, but legible enough to be used for longer text. The straight and rounded corners, combined with the deep cuts and asymmetric serifs, give it a distinctive look while still keeping its legibility.” The bold weight is available as a free download in OpenType format. Designed by Mugur Mihai.

Free Font Adec This typeface was inspired by Art Deco and Constructivism. It would fit posters, magazines and logos. The distinguishing feature of this font is the combination of decorative elements, such as textures and frames. Designed by Serge Shi.

Jean-Luc (Godard) (via I Love Typography) “Atelier Carvalho Bernau Design released Jean-Luc, a typeface inspired by the title cards of films like ‘Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle,’ to celebrate Jean-Luc Godard’s birthday. The style of lettering is so interesting to us because it is such a clear renunciation of the ‘pretty’ classical title screens that were common in that time’s more conservative films. It has a more vernacular and brutishly low-brow character; this lettering comes from the street.” To embed the font using @font-face, a copyright code must be appended as a comment in the source code.

Arvo Font Family This slab-serif typeface was created by Anton Koovit especially for the Google Font directory. It is optimized for Web use. The typeface is “monolinear-ish” but has a touch of contrast. For Windows users, the smaller 9, 12, 14 and 16 point sizes are hinted in Truetype format.

Thunderball This heavy sans font with 178 characters could be useful for posters, postcards and similar designs. Released under a Creative Commons license.

Spatha Sans A sans-serif font with organic playful shapes that set a friendly tone and are easy to read. The font could be a good fit for titles and maybe short text. Designed by Carvente Dice.

Spatha Serif As a counterpart to the above-mentioned Spatha Sans, the glyphs in Spatha Serif have classic proportions and short serifs, which retain the playful and organic design. The font can also be embedded using @font-face, but a credit link is required. Designed by Carvente Dice.

My Fair Cody An interesting playful typeface that makes a an impression with its personality and warmth. The tone is inviting and informal, and as such might not be the best fit for a corporate context. Designed by Darim Kim, and available in OpenType format. You may use the font in your private and commercial projects; but if you embed it using @font-face, then a credit link is required.

Matchbook Matchbook is a simple and functional set of two typefaces, designed in serif and sans-serif versions. Each set includes all accented characters and works beautifully in larger sizes.

Mota Pixel Mota Pixel is a simple pixel font with simple roots. The regular weight was created as a custom design for TypeShow and is now available for free to the public. Optimized for use in 20-pixel increments, it is a larger than normal pixel design. Still, the regular is rather thin and delicate, expressing some tendencies of an upright italic.

Further Resources

Soma FontFriendFontFriend is a bookmarklet for typographically obsessed web designers. It enables rapid checking of fonts and font styles directly in the browser without editing code and refreshing pages, making it the ideal companion for creating CSS font stacks.

Cure for the Common Webfont: Alternatives to GeorgiaFor nearly fifteen years, if you wanted to set a paragraph of web text in a serif typeface, the only truly readable option was Georgia. But now we’re starting to see some valid alternatives for the king of screen serifs. What follows is a list of serif typefaces that have been tuned for the screen.

How to Detect Font-Smoothing Using JavaScriptSome fonts look bad on computer monitors without font-smoothing enabled in the operating system. The author of this article initially thought there wasn’t a way, but after seeing a promising but incomplete method of detecting font-smoothing, he spent a few days devising a way to do it.

When Free Fonts Aren’t FreeTo ensure that you’re using “free” fonts as their creators intended, here are four things to look for when you’re scanning a EULA.

iOS FontsAn overview of font families available on iOS devices such as iPhone and iPad.

Last Click

Adfont Calendar 2010 Here is Fontdeck’s typographic Advent calendar. Open the current day’s door and behind it you’ll find details of a great typeface, with a Web font offer available free for that day only. To use the offer, click “Purchase font licenses” in your Fontdeck settings before the day is over. Free subscription applies to websites with < 1 million page views per month.

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

1. Dress For The Occasion

Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as though they were searching for new music to listen to: they assess the personality of each face and look for something unique and distinctive that expresses their particular aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history. This approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality.

The most appropriate analogy for picking type. (Photo credit: Samuuraijohnny. Used under Creative Commons license.)

For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.

My “favorite” piece of clothing is probably an outlandish pair of 70s flare bellbottoms that I bought at a thrift store, but the reality is that these don’t make it out of my closet very often outside of Halloween. Every designer has a few favorite fonts like this — expressive personal favorites that we hold onto and wait for the perfect festive occasion to use. More often, I find myself putting on the same old pair of Levis morning after morning. It’s not that I like these better than my cherished flares, exactly… I just seem to wind up wearing them most of the time.

Every designer has a few workhorse typefaces that are like comfortable jeans: they go with everything, they seem to adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or more formal as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to come out of the closet day after day. Usually, these are faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold, etc) and/or cuts (Italic, Condensed, etc). My particular safety blankets are: Myriad, Gotham, DIN,Akzidenz Grotesk and Interstate among the sans; Mercury, Electra and Perpetua among the serif faces.

A large type family like Helvetica Neue can be used to express a range of voices and emotions. Versatile and comfortable to work with, these faces are like a favorite pair of jeans for designers.

2. Know Your Families: Grouping Fonts

The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of closet we need to put together. The next challenge is to develop some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the different typefaces we run across.

Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories (Scotch Modern, anybody?), but we only really need to keep track of five groups to establish a working understanding of the majority of type being used in the present-day landscape.

The following list is not meant as a comprehensive classification of each and every category of type (there are plenty of great sites on the web that already tackle this, such as Typedia’s type classifications) but rather as a manageable shorthand overview of key groups. Let’s look at two major groups without serifs (serifs being the little feet at the ends of the letterforms), two with serifs, and one outlier (with big, boxey feet).

1. Geometric Sans

I’m actually combining three different groups here (Geometric, Realist and Grotesk), but there is enough in common between these groups that we can think of them as one entity for now. Geometric Sans-Serifs are those faces that are based on strict geometric forms. The individual letter forms of a Geometric Sans often have strokes that are all the same width and frequently evidence a kind of “less is more” minimalism in their design.

At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal, boring. A classic Geometric Sans is like a beautifully designed airport: it’s impressive, modern and useful, but we have to think twice about whether or not we’d like to live there.

2. Humanist Sans

These are Sans faces that are derived from handwriting — as clean and modern as some of them may look, they still retain something inescapably human at their root. Compare the ‘t’ in the image above to the ‘t’ in ‘Geometric’ and note how much more detail and idiosyncrasy the Humanist ‘t’ has.

This is the essence of the Humanist Sans: whereas Geometric Sans are typically designed to be as simple as possible, the letter forms of a Humanist font generally have more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights — after all they come from our handwriting, which is something individuated. At their best, Humanist Sans manage to have it both ways: modern yet human, clear yet empathetic. At their worst, they seem wishy-washy and fake, the hand servants of corporate insincerity.

3. Old Style

Also referred to as ‘Venetian’, these are our oldest typefaces, the result of centuries of incremental development of our calligraphic forms. Old Style faces are marked by little contrast between thick and thin (as the technical restrictions of the time didn’t allow for it), and the curved letter forms tend to tilt to the left (just as calligraphy tilts). Old Style faces at their best are classic, traditional, readable and at their worst are… well, classic and traditional.

Examples of Old Style: Jenson, Bembo, Palatino, and — especially — Garamond, which was considered so perfect at the time of its creation that no one really tried much to improve on it for a century and a half.

4. Transitional and Modern

An outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, Transitional (mid 18th Century) and Modern (late 18th century, not to be confused with mid 20th century modernism) typefaces emerged as type designers experimented with making their letterforms more geometric, sharp and virtuosic than the unassuming faces of the Old Style period. Transitional faces marked a modest advancement in this direction — although Baskerville, a quintessential Transitional typeface, appeared so sharp to onlookers that people believed it could hurt one’s vision to look at it.

In carving Modernist punches, type designers indulged in a kind of virtuosic demonstration of contrasting thick and thin strokes — much of the development was spurred by a competition between two rival designers who cut similar faces, Bodoni and Didot. At their best, transitional and modern faces seem strong, stylish, dynamic. At their worst, they seem neither here nor there — too conspicuous and baroque to be classic, too stodgy to be truly modern.

Examples of transitional typefaces: Times New Roman, Baskerville.Examples of Modern serifs: Bodoni, Didot.

5. Slab Serifs

Also known as ‘Egyptian’ (don’t ask), the Slab Serif is a wild card that has come strongly back into vogue in recent years. Slab Serifs usually have strokes like those of sans faces (that is, simple forms with relatively little contrast between thick and thin) but with solid, rectangular shoes stuck on the end. Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that they convey very specific — and yet often quite contradictory — associations: sometimes the thinker, sometimes the tough guy; sometimes the bully, sometimes the nerd; sometimes the urban sophisticate, sometimes the cowboy.

They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy versions like Rockwell, but they can also be quite friendly, as in the recent favorite Archer. Many slab serifs seem to express an urban character (such as Rockwell, Courier and Lubalin), but when applied in a different context (especially Clarendon) they strongly recall the American Frontier and the kind of rural, vernacular signage that appears in photos from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize about as a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function something like a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they add a distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become overly conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.

3. Don’t Be a Wimp: The Principle of Decisive Contrast

So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. Most of the time, one typeface will do, especially if it’s one of our workhorses with many different weights that work together. If we reach a point where we want to add a second face to the mix, it’s always good to observe this simple rule: keep it exactly the same, or change it a lot — avoid wimpy, incremental variations.

This is a general principle of design, and its official name is correspondence and contrast. The best way to view this rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected in your last trip through Europe and dump them out on a table together. If you put two identical coins next to each other, they look good together because they match (correspondence). On the other hand, if we put a dime next to one of those big copper coins we picked up somewhere in Central Europe, this also looks interesting because of the contrast between the two — they look sufficiently different.

What doesn’t work so well is when put our dime next to a coin from another country that’s almost the same size and color but slightly different. This creates an uneasy visual relationship because it poses a question, even if we barely register it in on a conscious level — our mind asks the question of whether these two are the same or not, and that process of asking and wondering distracts us from simply viewing.

When we combine multiple typefaces on a design, we want them to coexist comfortably — we don’t want to distract the viewer with the question, are these the same or not? We can start by avoiding two different faces from within one of the five categories that we listed above all together — two geometric sans, say Franklin and Helvetica. While not exactly alike, these two are also not sufficiently different and therefore put our layout in that dreaded neither-here-nor-there place.

If we are going to throw another font into the pot along with Helvetica, much better if we use something like Bembo, a classic Old Style face. Centuries apart in age and light years apart in terms of inspiration, Helvetica and Bembo have enough contrast to comfortably share a page:

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just picking fonts that are very, very different — placing our candy cane font next to, say, Garamond or Caslon does not guarantee us typographic harmony. Often, as in the above example of Helvetica and Bembo, there’s no real explanation for why two faces complement each other — they just do.

But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This shared common aspect can be visual (similar x-height or stroke weight) or it can be chronological. Typefaces from the same period of time have a greater likelihood of working well together… and if they are by the same designer, all the better.

4. A Little Can Go a Long Way

‘Enough with all these conventional-looking fonts and rules!’ you say. ‘I need something for my rave flyer! And my Thai restaurant menu! And my Christmas cards!’ What you’re pointing out here is that all the faces I’ve discussed so far are ‘body typefaces’, meaning you could conceivably set a whole menu or newspaper with any of them; in the clothing analogy presented in part one, these are our everyday Levis. What of our Halloween flares?

Periodically, there’s a need for a font that oozes with personality, whether that personality is warehouse party, Pad Thai or Santa Claus. And this need brings us into the vast wilderness of Display typefaces, which includes everything from Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny fonts. ‘Display’ is just another way of saying ‘do not exceed recommended dosage‘: applied sparingly to headlines, a display font can add a well-needed dash of flavor to a design, but it can quickly wear out its welcome if used too widely.

Betsey’s outfit works because the pink belts acts as an accent and is offset by the down-to-earthiness of blue jeans. But if we get carried away and slather Betsey entirely in pink, she might wind up looking something like this:

Let’s call this the Pink Belt Principle of Type: display faces with lots of personality are best used in small doses. If we apply our cool display type to every bit of text in our design, the aesthetic appeal of the type is quickly spent and — worse yet — our design becomes very hard to read. Let’s say we’re designing a menu for our favorite corner Thai place. Our client might want us to use a ‘typically’ Asian display face, like Sho:

So far, so good. But look what happens when we apply our prized font choice to the entire menu:

Enough already. Let’s try replacing some of the rank-and-file text copy with something more neutral:

That’s better. Now that we’ve reined in the usage of our star typeface, we’ve allowed it to shine again.

5. Rule Number Five Is ‘There Are No Rules’

Really. Look hard enough and you will find a dazzling-looking menu set entirely in a hard-to-read display font. Or of two different Geometric Sans faces living happily together on a page (in fact, just this week I wound up trying this on a project and was surprised to find that it hit the spot). There are only conventions, no ironclad rules about how to use type, just as there are no rules about how we should dress in the morning. It’s worth trying everything just to see what happens — even wearing your Halloween flares to your court date.

In Conclusion

Hopefully, these five principles will have given you some guidelines for how to select, apply and mix type — and, indeed, whether to mix it at all. In the end, picking typefaces requires a combination of understanding and intuition, and — as with any skill — demands practice. With all the different fonts we have access to nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there’s nothing like a classic typeface used well by somebody who knows how to use it.

Some of the best type advice I ever received came early on from my first typography teacher: pick one typeface you like and use it over and over for months to the exclusion of all others. While this kind of exercise can feel constraining at times, it can also serve as a useful reminder that the quantity of available choices in the internet age is no substitute for quality.

Other Resources

You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:

Typedia Type Classifications A more extensive list of different categories and sub-categories of typefaces than the simplified version presented in this article.

So You Need A Typeface? Useful — and humorous — flowchart for selecting type, brought to you by Julian Hansen via Inspiration Lab.

As web and graphic designers, fonts play an increasingly bigger role in our work. Sometimes, a client gives us a logo that’s really just a 200 pixel wide jpeg image rather than a true vector based logo. The task of figuring out what font is used in that logo used to be tricky, if not impossible.

Thankfully, the surge of web based design tools benefits this situation, and there are a few font discovery services available online that can save hours of work looking for a specific font.

First, let’s talk about how these sites work. Usually a file of with your font is uploaded (or linked via a url) to the site, then scanned to find glyphs that match a font. This only works with letters with spacing, so sometimes a bit of Photoshop work needs to be done to separate letters that have been kerned and tracked very closely together.

Once your image is uploaded, a list of the closest fonts is given, usually with links to either download or purchase the font.

For the What the Font service from MyFonts, the first step is to upload or link an image. Then comes the character selection screen, where your image shows up split into as many characters as the site can see, with a text box beneath.

If it’s an easy one, What the Font will have these character boxes filled in with the correct letters, although the user is supposed to make sure the text box is the character highlighted in the image before going to the last step.

Character boxes are supposed to be left blank if no valid character is highlighted from your font, so that the system doesn’t pick up the wrong font. Testing a few logos on here, What the Font did a good job of finding the correct font, but only with separation.

In my experience the system works about half the time, of course this is totally dependent on your file, but What the Font did miss some widely used (and well spaced) fonts from some of the samples I tried. What the Font does have an iPhone app available, where users can bring font discovery with them on the road.

The WhatFontIs service is very similar to What the Font in the way it works, but they’ve added one little touch that seems to help a lot: the ability to select if an image is on a dark background where the image is inverted prior to processing.

This lets darker images and logos be used. One of the best things about WhatFontIs is that on the results page the font matches are shown with the characters selected, creating the word you were looking for in a list of possible font matches. This is very similar to the way well known free font directory DaFont allows most fonts to be previews with a word or phrase.

The service itself seemed to perform at the same level as What the Font, but interestingly enough the results on some of my test images returned a completely different lists of font matches. There’s also a selection to look for just free fonts, commercial fonts, or both.

These two font discovery tools are very useful for web and graphic designers that need to quickly and efficiently find a specific font for a project. What has your experience been with font discovery services?

This series is brought to you by the Intel AppUp℠ Developer Program, which provides developers with everything they need to create and then sell their applications to millions of Intel Atom™ processor-based devices. Learn more here.

The world of web fonts and web typography is exploding. After years of struggle, we’re finally at a point where using real fonts on the web is a viable option.

For web designers, this is huge news because it means a greater degree of control over how content is displayed. For end users, it means a richer web experience.

Thanks to web services like Typekit, Fonts.com Web Fonts, Webtype and others, the opportunities to integrate real fonts on the web is getting better all the time.

Let’s look at five of the biggest trends taking place with web font and web typography design.

1. WOFF as a Standard

The Web Open Font Format, or WOFF, is edging ever closer to becoming the de facto standardized format for using fonts on the web.

Backed by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WOFF allows TrueType, OpenType or Open Font Format fonts to be embedded into web pages.

Right now, WOFF support is built into Firefox 3.6 and above, Google Chrome version 5 and above, Internet Explorer 9, and will be supported in upcoming versions of Safari.

Jason Santa Maria and his Friends of Mighty built Lost World’s Fairs as a way to showcase IE 9 and its support of WOFF. This fantastic piece of typographic web art really shows just how great type can be made to look on the web.

2. Big Foundries Jump on Board

When Adobe announced that they were partnering with Typekit back in August, it was a big move. Historically, the biggest font foundries have led the resistance against getting fonts on the web.

Adobe’s decision was followed recently by the new company, Webtype, a partnership of Ascender, Roger Black and Font Bureau. Similar to Typekit, Webtype offers a way for designers or end users to get high quality fonts for use in their own designs.

Last week, Monotype Imaging formally launched Fonts.com Web Fonts and brought many of the most famous Monotype, Linotype and ITC font families to the web.

At this stage, nearly every major foundry is either offering fonts with web usage licenses or is considering making their fonts usable on the web. Eighteen months ago, that wouldn’t have been a reality. Today it is.

3. Better Letter Control with Lettering.js

When creating the Lost World’s Fairs project, Friends of Mighty realized they would need to have a way to better control individual letters and words to offer proper spacing and better kerning.

Thus, Lettering.js was born. Lettering.js is a JavaScript plugin that allows developers and designers to better control individual letters without having tons of messy markup.

As Dan Rubin recently remarked on Twitter, Lettering.js may just end up having a bigger impact on typography on the web than anyone is expecting.

4. Mobile Support

Fonts.com Web Fonts service and Typekit both offer support for multiple mobile browsers. This continues to increase as more and more mobile browser makers support various aspects of @font-face and draft specifications like WOFF.

It’s not just enough for fonts to look good on the desktop, as more and more web usage shifts to the smartphone, having readable, legible and properly spaced typography on mobile devices will be a bigger and bigger area of interest.

Already companies like Monotype and Typekit are working to make sure that fonts look their best on a number of different screen types and sizes.

5. Font Support in Web Apps

One of the most interesting recent advancements in the web font world has been the ability to choose web fonts when customizing an aspect of a web app. Thanks to Typekit and Google’s Web Font Directory, it’s easy for developers to build these tools into their product.

Already many Tumblr themes are coming with Typekit support and new web services like About.me give users the option to customize their typefaces for various aspects of their profile.

This is a great use of typography on the web because it gives end-users direct interaction with fonts and lets them see directly how different fonts look together and at different sizes.

Web typography is on a tear and we’re at the beginning of a new era of a more beautiful, more legible and more customizable web.

Series supported by Intel AppUp℠ Developer Program

This series is brought to you by the Intel AppUp℠ Developer Program, which provides developers with everything they need to create and then sell their applications to millions of Intel Atom™ processor-based devices. Learn more here.